Owning Up: Common Mistakes in Leadership and Strategy

Jonathan  0:01  

Welcome back, everybody to another episode of the strategy gap. Actually special episode today we have no guests, but Joe and I are here live in person together. So if you're listening on Spotify or Apple podcast, feel free to hop on to YouTube, you can see the video of us chatting back and forth and join us as if you're sitting in the room with us. 

Joe  0:20  

Very excitedly reporting live from Dunwoody, Georgia, which is right north of Atlanta For those keeping score. So we used to be like this more often before the pandemic. So when we're here for meetings, we figured why don't we take a special use of that, and let's do one of these slightly differently than we normally do. So it's an absolute pleasure to be here.

Jonathan  0:37  

Yeah, and actually topic for conversations today is based on an article you sent I guess, maybe a month or so ago now. I think it's probably timely with what a lot of organizations are going through kicking off a year ago into the planning cycle. And it was an article about some happenings at Disney and I think anybody that's a fan of anything Disney or a fan of movies certainly knows that. Disney couldn't miss when it came to movies, right? They had Star Wars Marvel. And then as of late, things started taking a little bit of a turn. Well, what struck me with the article you sent me and I'll kind of pull out my notes here. The article was titled Disney CEO says the Marvel's failed because there wasn't executive supervision on set. So think about that title, and, you know, expect what's coming from it a lot of information in there. And of course, none of this is us saying what we did and didn't happen in the Disney situation. But it is an interesting perspective. Two quotes from Bob Iger that he talked about during a New York Times Leadership Summit, where he said, quality needs attention. It doesn't happen by accident, quantity, in our case, diluted quality. I think that statement is totally fair, makes sense. However, he followed it up with a quote, they said, there wasn't as much supervision on the set, so to speak, where we have executives that are really looking over what's being done day after day after day. So again, if I'm someone working in those sets, working over the movies, that probably isn't going to sit well with me. But Joe, you send it to me It struck you love to get your thoughts on the article. Yeah, for those

Joe  2:10  

paying attention to Disney, Bob Iger stepped back in after a couple of years of poor success. So this the Marvel's movie, the most recent cinematic release was the most recent evidence of a decline in overall quality and it gets people's appetite for seeing things. So Bob Iger didn't return to Disney under some amazing circumstances, he was brought back in, because maybe there wasn't supervision in the previous role. But he's there now. And he's back. And this is a good example, at least it stuck with me is like there was a situation where a project did not have the results they expected because more of a movies in the in the past would TEDx the spend on what they cost to make the movie plus all the marketing expense, this one basically broke even, which is not what they're shooting for. So this is interesting only because they the leader of the organization, the highest seat and all the place is basically saying it's, it's their fault, if we were there things would have been different. It's essentially what it is. So the old idea that victory has many parents and failure is an orphan example of this. And so I guess this really tees up the conversation that Jonathan are trying to have today, which is not the best look when a leader does that. And so what are some mistakes people have made in a similar vein where in an attempt to explain maybe somebody that didn't go, well, instead of taking ownership, they cast blame on something else, which could have the opposite effect?

Jonathan  3:33  

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think anybody, probably in any type of role, whether you're working at a strategy role, or even working at a chain restaurant, you've experienced some level of disappointment in the way that your leadership maybe has interacted or you've been working with the organization and how their leadership has responded to a situation. And certainly strategy and strategy execution is full of opportunities for these sorts of situations. Yeah, so really, based on that, you know, we're going to go one at a time go through top mistakes that we've seen, because certainly this is one example that we're talking about with Disney. But anybody who has at any sort of organizational experience, or even working at a basic chain restaurant or a store, you've seen some example where you've been disappointed by how somebody else in the organization, particularly leadership has responded in this situation. And many of our leaders and one of our listeners fall under leadership, and hopefully through these mistakes that we talked about, we can avoid these situations more in the future when they do come up. So with my first overall picker, the first one I'm going to talk through all go back and forth, I'm going to couch is not making enough space for others opinions or voices. Anytime I think about mistakes that leadership make, there's one single example that always sticks out in my mind, my Roman Empire, if you will, right, is I was working with an organization doing an engagement where you're leaving a session, and it's only successful, if there's a lot of conversation, a lot of input from the group, most of the time, you can kick off a conversation, you go, people are chatting, and your job is just facilitating on foreign of the spectrum as people that don't want to give anything. And I'll always remember this situation, I was even joking about how look like, I don't have the joke that I am going to be up here all day, because I literally am going to be up here all day in still there was no response. But at that moment, the president kind of raised his hand and he said, I don't know, I feel like maybe I need to leave the room. And that really sat with me, it's like, well, you're very aware that there's something going on, because you're in this room, other people are not able to speak their mind on the problems or opportunities for improvement. So that's not a good culture to be a part of, you know, being a culture where you can encourage ideas where you can encourage input where you can be receptive of that input is a much better way than creating this negative culture where even in an open forum, nobody's willing to provide their input.

Joe  8:01  

I mean, I was actually at that engagement with Jonathan. And I think it was his first time on the road where I was observing him as he was basically making sure he can go on the road and do it on his own. So it was a difficult situation to be in. And you can tell if you're this type of leader, at least in my opinion, if a question is asked by someone like Jonathan, about 10% of the strategies are executed 90% aren't, what percentage would you give yourself and instead of answering, everybody tilts their head and looks at the leader to see what they're gonna say, that happens more than once, especially the beginning, you're pretty much booked. The session was a complete waste of time. I mean, we were, we were there lamenting, who spent the whole day there, but it felt like really didn't do anything because there was nothing that got done. Anything that was said by the CEO was fine. Everybody else didn't say anything. Or if they did say something. It was something benign that made no sense over the whole goal of having us there was to break the logjam of how come we're not executing our plans at a high level and if nobody's being honest that things aren't going well, then they made no progress and long story short, they did not see any any success over the long term and kind of stayed status quo for better for worse. So that's that is difficult and ultimately, don't be that leader. If you find that people are looking to you before asking questions that you are making the mistake not only in that one meeting, but probably in general. So that will be to pick it out a pigtail piggyback off Jonathan's piggy tails. Good job that said, being in the room, you know it you see it, it's feels uncomfortable and everybody. Generally speaking at that day, we remember those sometimes better than the good days. But that Thank you, Jonathan, for that.

Jonathan  9:36  

Yeah, what's your first one, go

Joe  9:37  

for it? Well, I'm gonna hit the tennis ball back. The one that I've seen is that many times when you're launching a new strategic plan, as we know it's a large change management exercise. And no matter what that change management would be, it could be that we're giving everybody a raise and an extra 10 weeks of vacation, somebody no matter what will always have something bad to say about it or will not buy in. And so a mistake that I've seen, some leaders make, and it happens more often than you think, is letting the loud dictate for the rest of the people in the organization. So the people that are typically unhappy are the ones that are the loudest. And some leaders who maybe are unsure of the change themselves, will use that as validation to say I, this is an example of why we shouldn't be doing here, this person here must be representative of how everyone is feeling. And so therefore, I'm going to let them off the hook. And that usually happens when you're rolling out something that resembles new and different types of work, I need you to track your work that looks like this, I need you to report on something like that. Some people are very intimidated by that concept. So instead of just seeing how it goes, and maybe giving their best foot forward, they immediately say I'm not down for this at all. And I'm gonna let everybody know, that only works if somebody on the other side from a leadership perspective is receptive. And then the case that I'm talking about, it was a global rollout of strategy. And there were about 10% of the organization that was pretty loud, and leadership buckled to that pressure. And as a result, they did not see the change that they expected, they did not roll out this master plan. And it's unfortunate, because there was a lot of excitement, but due to the, to the the attitudes of a few, it causes the whole project to fail. And I don't know if you've you were there, too. So

Jonathan  11:17  

yeah, you know, that sort of thing is challenging, because it's, in some cases that that works, right? It has to, it has to do with the personality of that individual, or that 10% of the voice that if they've got, if that's the 10%, that's got the buy in, they're the ones that you know, the chiefs that can go and get everybody else motivated, and on the same path with it, then yeah, it works. But if maybe they're not in the best footing with everybody else, then it's probably not gonna work. And in that situation to figure out well, all right, maybe this is the right path, or maybe it's not the right path. But we need to figure out what the rest of the 90% thinks, or maybe not all 90%, but enough of the people to then understand if that is the right approach, or how to get the rest of the group on board as well.

Joe  12:02  

I mean, there is there is some validity to that. Because ultimately, if a change is being rolled out, it doesn't always mean it's the right one. So you might be actually right, in your, in your opinion, and raising your hand saying I don't agree with this. I mean, there's pros and cons to that for your career, I suppose. But for the most part, let's assume and in this case, quite honestly, the engagement we're talking about, they needed to go through this change, because the organization was completely in a different kind of operating model. And they needed to make structural change. And so I will go out on a limb and say in this engagement, the change was good. And even so the people were against it, not to say that you haven't been in organizations where somebody is advocating for change. And all of a sudden you're like this is completely contrary to I know what works. And I feel compelled to say something and we're not using that as an example. It's when generally speaking, if given its due, the strategy would be good. 10% don't like it, they raise their hand make a stink and leadership buckles to them, versus maybe finding 10% I've actually enjoyed it. We talked about it a lot on this strategy gap. But the idea of your organization being a bell curve, 10% love everything. 10% hate everything. The middle 80% can be swayed by other side. And unfortunately for everybody, sometimes the squeaky wheels are the ones that get the attention and it causes the ruin of some really great strategies. That could have been fantastic. Yeah. So back to you. What do you got? Yeah,

Jonathan  13:19  

and next up on this good, good transition here. What happens if you don't get enough in but sometimes you overcorrect to getting too much input. So my next one is don't overcorrect and get too much in. But perfect example of this is situations where we said alright, we're starting our strategic planning process, we're gonna go to each location and do these town hall meetings and get all this input and fantastic ideas definitely do that. The issue comes to how do you then use that information. And typically one of two things either happens, they have their plan is finalized. And they you know, they open it up, and there's 1000 items that it's way too long to actually ever be done. And that's because they want to do every single idea. They think that just because someone had an idea, they have to go forward and do it, or they're going to like they're going to disappoint people because they got this input, they're not actually able to do that. So that's, that's one example. The other example is they do all these town halls and they unveil their plan, and they didn't take any input from the actual things. And that's probably actually even worse. You might as well you should have just not even done the town hall because you're giving these people the impression that hey, your input matters, your ideas matter. We want to collect this because we're gonna use it and how we proceed forward. And oh, by the way, we didn't actually do anything that you said we should do. So it's a balance, right? You want to be there you want to feel like people are involved in the process. You want to get their input, but you also need to be prepared to make those tough decisions around of all these ideas. What are we going to do and what are we not going to do and making sure that you're communicating that to people afterwards? So they actually do feel involved in that process? Yeah,

Joe  14:52  

I think you're you're speaking to is the idea of be of authenticity. Having being authentic. I worked at a large unnamed pharmaceutical company for a number of years before joining achieve it. And we had terminals all the time they love getting our feedback. But guess what any questions that you wanted to ask had to be submitted ahead of time and approved. So they made it seem like the questions being asked from the audience were spontaneous, because we'd all funnel into the big conference room at the World Headquarters in beautiful New Jersey. And the questions were definitely not approved, even if there's questions from the executives probably what exactly are they? And sometimes they would tell people, I need you to ask this question and be walked to the mic. So everybody knew that was the case. And then to John's point, none of our feedback really then changed anything and actually had quite the opposite. If you had some real feedback that was deemed to be negative, you were not long for the world there. So to the point, if you're going to do a town hall, and it takes a lot of effort to do it, do it right, and try to do something to that resembles being authentic to say, we took your feedback and we applied it or no offense, your feedback wasn't so great, we tracked it down and we did our due diligence, it just doesn't seem viable. Let people know that their feedback actually was taken. And it doesn't take much to do it. But so people are scared of having that conversation saying your baby is ugly, and we're not doing your strategy, you got to have it.

Jonathan  16:05  

At a minimum, just close the feedback loop. Right. Nobody wants to be uncertain about what happened at the end of it. So whether you're going to do it, or whether you're not at least let people know what you did, and why you or how you came to that decision. Exactly.

Joe  16:18  

And I think kind of a slight variation, which I was talking about is what I've seen is that many times when we're doing implementations for and for those that are listening to achieve, it helps organizations with our software, but we also have services that allow for the software to be utilized, because software needs to have a strategic plan that is in a good place for it to be utilized. And as a result, sometimes it needs a little bit of TLC. So what we do is we'll schedule a launch event with our clients, we will come out and we'll visit and we'll spend the whole day with everybody. And we'll have the senior executives show up we'll have anybody who's in charge of the strategy show up. And I'd say it happens more often than I care to mention. Day of let's say the senior leader says I had something come up and I can't I can't join anymore. And so now you're in a room full of people that don't have the validation from the person whose idea was it to be there in the first place, especially when that leader was probably the one that signed off on the project. They didn't make the priority of being in the room that day. And it sends a terrible message. And I know sometimes something stuff happens. So for those don't get too upset with me, I understand stuff happens, I get it. But sometimes what we're talking about is I'm scheduling four or five weeks out. So yes, things could happen. But it's not like I put them to the meeting on their calendar the day before. So the moral of the story is that leaders that don't make the effort to be there and also fully participate in the day are really doing themselves a disservice and are telling everybody in the room that they could probably hold their breath and the symbol go away. And that's the opposite of what you should be doing. Yeah,

Jonathan  17:43  

I'd be interested in kind of your perspective on that is your why why aren't those leaders involved in this time? Is it genuinely because they don't care? Are they so busy? Are they they claim are so busy? And then out of the organization? Six months later, is there any common trend to that you've seen? Why would

Joe  18:01  

it be a consultant? If I wouldn't say that? It depends? No, it depends. I mean, I think sometimes yes, there are situations especially where we've got healthcare clients, there could be actual issues that pop up where the Joint Commission is knocking on your door that day, and they're doing their audit on announced, yeah, that's a good reason for it. Others may be busy, but they prioritize the wrong thing. So the fork in the road has appeared. And it's like I can join this other thing, or I can do this kickoff event. And they'll choose the other thing. And I guess the point I'm making is that then not being there is going to be detrimental to the whole process. And many times you can't ask the questions that people are asking, Well, why was this strategy selected, and the person who selected it wasn't actually in the room, therefore causes problems? So to Jonathan's point, the question I should say, I've seen a litany of excuses as to why people haven't shown up. But ultimately, none of them are really that great, to be honest, you should be there. And if you can't be there, I'd rather you canceled the meeting, and we can rebook our flights for the day. I rather delay it by a week or two or even a month that to go there and do it without that person there. It's a waste of time for my team and anybody else who's there. Yeah, I

Jonathan  19:04  

don't think you know, this is a controversial opinion. But I'd argue the number one thing a leader can do with strategy. And effective strategy execution, is just to enforce that at max, right, just to make sure that people don't forget about it. You can go through different processes, you can try out different strategies, but it's going to fail if you're not committed to it. And the first thing you need to be committed to it is to be present, right? Be there, help the decisions, help the conversation, facilitate that. Because if you're not well, then you're not going to be involved later. Nobody's gonna think it matters. There's going to hold their breath and when they let go, it's going to be gone. Yeah, because

Joe  19:39  

the you are meant to get on my soapbox, but for you, as a leader to say, the strategic planning Summit is not worth my time. And we somehow have it all figured out. Any business, my business, any business, we don't have it figured out where if you look at a 10 year time horizon, you look at the s&p 500 the amount of companies that come on and off that list on a regular basis just because poor performance, we blow your mind anytime you really interesting Oh check and household names that are no longer being traded on the NASDAQ or the s&p 500, or the Dow composite, just because their market cap isn't big enough, or they had some sort of operational failure, household names where if I want to transport you back 10 years ago and said, X, Y, and Z company is going to fail, you had laughed me out of the room, it happens more often than we need to. And that needs to. And many times, it's because it's a failure to innovate. They're so comfortable with their current results, operationally speaking, hey, look at our our net income, it's so good. And we're having market shares and three improving no doubt that that could be the case for today. But we're talking about strategies that could be three years from now. And that could easily not be the case for you anymore. I think the most interesting example of that would be currently the merger trying to happen with JetBlue. And, and spirit airways. I mean, Spirit Airways, for the most part was a belle of the ball when it came to financial performance, and all the things that come along with being a budget airline. But over the course of a few years, they've lost their ways. And the only way out of the jungle for them is to be acquired by JetBlue. Right now, with the various things that are happening, it's either they go out of business, or they're appealing the merger with the SEC with the Federal Trade Commission. So that's not the best place to be 10 years ago, eight years ago, Spirit Airlines was one of the best well run companies on the planet. And due to a variety of market factors, they're no longer exactly where they need to be. So

Jonathan  21:23  

they didn't have a panel flat three airplane either. That's true. And they still

Joe  21:26  

have a Boeing's but not that one. Yeah, my flight here, by the way, was canceled because of that door. United Airlines, it's about 40 of those planes. So it shows you what a failure in strategy across the board the actual ripple effects, and maybe the Boeing executives that knows.

Jonathan  21:43  

Well, we'll keep going. We'll do a few more here. Number three, for me is poor communication after the plan is finished. Right? So we've actually been talking a lot so far about or what are we all the things we're doing to get the plan created to get the plan launched. And you know, I'd say for the most part of the entire process, normally organizations haven't figured out at the beginning, right building that plan. But then they say, you know that their follow up townhall, they say, here's our beautiful plan, or beautiful, you know, beach lake here that keeps changing behind us. This is our nice, our nice plan that we're going to be accomplishing. And they roll it all, it's excitement that there are you know, virtual party or some party in their office about it, and then and then nothing, right, nothing happens afterwards. So maybe for a month or a quarter, they do a follow up. But future all company meetings go on, there's no mention of that plan and how it goes. So maybe it's still being executed in small group, right? Leadership Team still focused on it, the strategy team still focused on it, but the rest of the company, the people that are actually responsible for doing the work, maybe they're asked for updates, but it's never talked about. So to them, it's like, well, I've got so many things to do. And you're asking me to do this one thing extra, but I never hear about it. I don't know what it means to how it ties in everything else. I don't know if we're on track with the goals that it's supposed to align to. So yeah, I'm probably not going to waste my time doing it.

Joe  23:06  

Yeah, I mean, people are going to spend their time on the things they think are going to be beneficial, mainly to them. I mean, when I when I deal with a bunch of altruistic folks that we're working with, we're all working organizations for a variety of reasons, but one of them is to ensure that we have the best career and that leads to all the wonderful things. So if we're like, what on my desk, can I take care of it's gonna have the biggest impact. If I me working on the strategic plan is of no matter to anybody, then I'm not going to do it. So you have to incent people to get this work done. And that can take the form of compensation packages that can take the form of recognition, there's a variety of ways from no cost to quite a bit of costs that you can do to put things in place to drive behavior, because any incentives you putting people in front of people should do should be there to drive behavior. That's why salespeople are, you know, that you work with are such interesting people, because they have one of the best incentive programs you could possibly have in front of them, which is you sell more you make more. So with strategic plans, if it's just, Hey, do this, and it's extra work, and there's no upside, then nobody's going to really pay attention to it. And especially if you're not communicating it, forget about it, that's even worse, I mean, so think about what you can be doing that would allow for people to actually pay attention to the plan, and stick to the plan in terms of keep their attention. And that would be through regular communication, like Jonathan mentioned, and putting some sort of incentive program in there to get people's attention. Sometimes it could be just recognition based, that's the lowest rung of cost, and then you can obviously go from there. So that would be my recommendation. And sort of in a similar vein, one of the mistakes that I've seen people make time and time again, is that they will leaders will sit in front of their group and say, I want you to be honest with me, when we start making status updates, so if something isn't going well, I want you to mark it something other than green. I want you to mark it yellow in red, and then as soon as somebody marks it yellow in red, they lose their mind. They press the button that opens the trapdoor and then they feed the police to the crocodiles. The moment that happens that no one's ever going to do it again. Yeah, absolutely not. So you base promises made promises kept. If you say I promise I won't get mad, it's like I'm sitcoms, tell me what's wrong, I promise I won't get mad. And then they tell him they go, I thought you weren't gonna get mad. And that's exactly what we're talking about here. So you have to his leaders resist the urge not to say that there aren't some sort of edge cases where somebody's ineptitude caused you to get mad. But when I'm talking about somebody saying this really difficult change initiative project is off track for these five reasons. And they're being honest with you, you have to really reward that honesty and put them on a pedestal. If you don't, and you get mad, then no one's going to be honest with you, and you're just going to be working through no fake info basically.

Jonathan  25:42  

Yeah, it's, it's the cheapest example but it always people always love the analogy is you get a project that's called a watermelon, right? It's green on the outside, but it's red on the inside. They're saying it's everything's going nice and swimmingly. But it really things are on the verge of disaster, and they're just too afraid to say anything. So the more you can encourage, it's not even encouraging, honestly, to be honest, I think that the better way to think about it is how are you going to use status reporting in your status to surface things for conversation, right, whether it's in a weekly meeting, whether it's in a monthly meeting, or executive meeting, use the status is to drive certain levels of communication, it doesn't necessarily have to mean that something is going wrong. It says, hey, look, I'm working on this project, there's a delay that's out of my control, I'm gonna mark it as yellow because I know that that's going to get to the attention of the senior leadership team. And now we can actually have a conversation about it as a group that's, that's beyond me. The framing it that way makes it less like, Hey, this is this is my problem that I can't handle it more like, look, this is an organizational problem, we need help, or else this is not going to be accomplished.

Joe  26:48  

I mean, a good example of this would be Marc Benioff, the founder and CEO and Co Co Founder of Salesforce manages a multi billion dollar company. And to go to pretty much any city in America, you'll see a Salesforce tower, most beautiful of which obviously be in San Francisco, if you can go to the top of the tower, it's the Ohana floor, it's open to the public, I highly recommend it. It's beautiful and free. But the way that he manages this multibillion dollar business with multiple diverse business units, we're talking slack, we're talking Tableau, we're talking about Salesforce, and all the different clouds they have available to them. There's leaders for each and his philosophy, for the most part is that he sits down with each of those leaders the beginning of the year. And they then set ambitious targets. So top line, bottom line growth, whatever that may be, and what that might look like. And they agree upon what those targets are. Typically, they're pretty ambitious, because that's the type of people he wants there. So we're saying 20% growth, let's say, if you are meeting those targets, you're doing well he meets with you once a month, and that in that time period, during that one on one that you have, you could talk about things that are going well, and maybe some things that you need. If you are not hitting those targets, you now have weekly meetings, and those weekly meetings happen until you either write the ship, or you're probably no longer with the organization. So that's a bit of a pressure cooker. But think about the what that message, it says it's like I am going to make the time for you. Whereas if you are doing your thing, and things are going well, and legitimately not just you feeling it, but you can point to numbers, I'll stay the way you do your thing. If you are not doing what you're supposed to do. I will leave with you more regularly. I hope those conversations are collegial. I haven't been in them. I don't know what it sounds like. I hope it's there to say what can I do to get you back on track. And that is the best thing a leader possibly can do is get out of the way of high performance and lean into maybe mediocre performance in the hopes of making them high performers. Yeah, same thing with strategic planning.

Jonathan  28:34  

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And, again, there's plenty of examples for how to do it more effectively. The overarching point is, whatever you're gonna say, you're gonna do make sure it's absolutely true, right? Back on it, don't you know, change, it can be an emotional situation, but make sure your employees and you are on the same level with what it means. I think maybe I've time for one or two more bills that weren't in the right. Let's see which one to do. Let's say um, I think one mistake a lot of companies make x happens during the execution process, is they focus too much on the shiny objects or the crystal balls, right, then maybe somebody goes to a conference, or you see something that your competitors doing, and you say, we got to stop everything, we have to do this. It's just as emotional as is right now. Or it's AI, we just record an episode on AI that's very similar to this where everyone thinks they have to do something related to AI because there's this pressure externally and internally that we that we need to change. But you don't actually take the time to figure out is this the right thing to do? And how does this impact the rest of the investments that we've made and the resources we've applied to other things? And also, what is the impact that changing things or shifting all of our country this is going to have on the rest of the organization that we did spend all this time getting buy in and everything else? We just keep changing back and forth, people are gonna get changed fatigue and change management's already hard enough. Getting that fatigue well, they're not going to listen anything that you say because they're just going to be ready for it to change again, and they're not going to invest that time. So I think, you know, staying true to the course, you know, if you need to make an adjustment, of course, make an adjustment, but it needs to be logical, it needs to be planned out. There needs to be trade offs and return on investments, not about about how you're switching these resources around, and then also clearly communicated what, how and why.

Joe  30:22  

Yeah, it seems like you think about the what the actual real impact of this if you're not doing this well, I mean, I spent a little more time on Twitter than I care to mention. But there's been sort of x has always taken pride Twitter out of my cold dead hands, though, is going to be Twitter. But there's been a real rash of layoffs in the tech industry recently, and a lot of them have been recorded for all to see. And it's been interesting. But the one that is the common through line here is for the most part, a lot of the companies have gotten ahead of them ahead of their skis when it comes to hiring. And so when it comes to making a strategic plan, there might be targets in there, there might be initiatives that on paper look like hire this many people and all that. But if you're also are those aren't realistic, or they're not being pressure tested, the downstream impact is a human impact. So this isn't sometimes we talk flippantly about strategic planning and the goal of it, I mean, ultimately, the goal of your strategic plan is to make the organization you're working with stronger and better so that the people that you that work for you and work with you have better lives, they're able to provide for their families get different career opportunities, and the people that you serve are getting better service better products, and it makes their life better. That's the only reason why we're any of us are doing this. So when that when the strategic plan is not executed to the highest potential, the end result could be the opposite of that, which is layoffs and things like that, that our customer is not getting the best product possible. And that ultimately, is what leaders that's your main job, right is keeping the bus out of the ditch. And that takes many forms. But most of the time throwing your employees under the bus, like we talked about at the start of this and yep, saying that their failure was their own. If I had, if only I had been in the room we would have been successful. Rarely is something that's going to allow for any sort of goodwill and, and long term, uplift. So I guess the moral of the story is, be authentic. If you say you're going to do something to Jonathan's point, if you're going to send a Friday note, send the Friday note, if you're going to have town halls, make them real, actually listen to people and follow up on what you've learned. And make sure that the plan sometimes is veering off into a bad direction. And somebody's telling you, honestly and you don't like it, resist the urge to get mad and really try to ensure that they feel comfortable sharing those changes with you. And then obviously, try to write the ship. So this isn't easy, but it's necessary.

Jonathan  32:36  

Yeah, yeah. I don't say nothing, nothing. Yeah, we solve the world's problems. Anything else you want to add in? Or? No, I

Joe  32:45  

think we're I think we're good. So ultimately, what it comes down to is that most of this is not as complicated as people make it out to be. It's the basic blocking and tackling. And a lot of that comes down to communication. You look at the 92% of a project managers, an effective project manager's job is effective communication internally and externally, and communication on a clockwork schedule. So take anything from today's conversation, you'll notice that many of the things that we brought up today could have been solved with simply better communication. Yeah. So just keep that in mind that that can be easy, or it can be hard that depends on you. And we're gonna explore these topics with our guests in the future. But we thought why not actually have a side chat? Yep.

Jonathan  33:24  

And my Yeah, my close is just be straightforward. This is be a be a human right. Don't try to VOB in your ivory tower. We've heard if it's real or warm in your head, think about the times that you were in the roles of the rest of the organization and the decisions that leaders above you made that you didn't like and don't repeat those mistakes. Just think about the rest of the organization as well. But yeah, I think it was a lot of fun. Joe enjoyed it with a five to do this more. For those that were watching the video. You got to see our background change a few times. audio, you can imagine what that looked like but where the coterie rolled through it. Yeah, but we'll do more of these in the in the future and thanks for listening in.

Joe  34:04  

Thanks, everybody.